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Tuesday, December 03, 2002

Ever nerdier.

For those Mac folks out there giving Chimera a try: I got a very handy hint from MacOSXHints last night that has made using Chimera much nicer. I still have IE set as my default browser, but Chimera is getting closer to the platonic ideal the more I tweak it.

Mozilla lets you set a feature called Minimum Font Size, which helps prevent sites that use a 96dpi grid from jaggedly smushing your fonts down to miniscule size (Wired News, I'm looking at you). If you're like me and you prefer to browse the web with fairly small default text sizes (I usually use 11 point or thereabouts), you'll get sick of the smushing fairly quickly, but you probably can't stand Mozilla's bloated user experience.

So quit Chimera, open its user.js file if it exists (it's just a text file, crack it open with BBEdit; if it doesn't exist, create a new text file in the same folder as prefs.js) and add this line:

user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-western", 9);

You can add additional lines with additional encodings, or you can change the 9 to your favorite number.

Now you can start Chimera back up and browse lovely sites like What Do I Know at your text size of choice without having to deal with the jagged smushies. PS, while we're on the subject of WDIK, he just linked to a very cute Snowflake Screensaver that will almost certainly put you in a holiday mood. Now I just need one with tiny, tumbling Ellen Feisses.

Posted at 10:25 AM

Comments

001. ree

i want pretty snowflakes for my PC!

Posted at 09:46AM on Friday, December 06, 2002

002. mox

Forget it, Ree. PCs are NEVER pretty. If one does try to look pretty, it still comes off as an ugly Mac.

Posted at 04:42PM on Friday, December 06, 2002

003. ree

well, i downloaded the image of the snowflakes and made it my background at work. it's better than nothing! x.

Posted at 04:22PM on Monday, December 09, 2002

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